1. Wireless is burst not pure data streams, latency issues. 2. High probability of interference. 3. High probability of collisions, wireless spectra bouncing off one another and objects, requiring multiple transmissions.
Big difference between Wireless and Wired / Fiber. Pokeman GO event in IL is a prime example of inherent issues.
Wireless internet for everyone will never be realistic. There's a theoretical limit to how much data you can send wirelessly, the "Shannon limit". On many bands we're already close to it, 90% of "5G" is just about using the rest of our bands more effectively. Once we're using all the frequency bands that penetrate far enough to be useful theres nothing you can do in increase wireless bandwidth. Theres more hope with satellites and narrow beams but these technologies are a decade away. 5G isn't going to do anything noticeable to ISP competition and I think you need to do more research on how 5G works if you think otherwise
Yea I don't think it will be realistic for everyone, especially folks outside of the city. I understand the concept of the Shannon limit. But I still think there is still plenty of opportunity for it to be useful in real world applications. I think you need to do some more research on some of the wireless breakthroughs going on and start ups in this space if you think otherwise.
Considering 4g just muddies the waters because there's no way we'll ever be able to provide the data allocations needed to make a realistic competitor. There's a good reason wireless has data-caps, it's all about limited spectrum. 4G/5G/wireless is, at this point and for the near future, a classic straw-man argument.
I was a lifelong moderate small-government republican until we elected the orange clown, and I still see telecom monopolies as a defiance of antitrust. Internet service is just as important and power or water hookups these days. It's a government utility and natural monopoly. The fact that we don't treat it that way is disturbing.
The best hope for competition in the home broadband market is municipal ownership of last-mile infrastructure. We need to lay last-mile fiber and it needs to be owned by the public, though network maintenance can be contracted out.
What confounds line-of-sight isn't "until it snows" but "until something/someone has to move around". :)
And there are lots of games you can play with QAM, channel-hopping, frequency division, and I am sure that future DSP experts will invent still more ways of getting more data to more people faster with less power. But the basic compromises still need to be dealt with. Using a wired link, you can blast data as fast as you want to yourself without messing with other people, on wireless things are more complicated.
But enough of that, to answer your question: here's a product that can get you 20 Gbps and 0.2 ms latency over hundreds of kilometers:
https://www.ubnt.com/airfiber/airfiber24-hd/
https://www.amazon.com/Ubiquiti-airFiber-AF-24-Worldwide-Lic...
Easy as that! ...but you're not about to mount one of those on your cell phone.
In an ideal world, all wireless access points could adjust their configurations as required. They'd share information on their physical locations, transceiver capabilities, power status, and bandwidth usage, with the data flowing across the landscape like electrical current in a sheet of metal or water in the shallow riffle of a stream. And of course all these devices would contain unimaginably brilliant and complex software that would manage all this with high efficiency, and they'd all interoperate seamlessly. And since this is the ideal world, no one would ever use the transceiver information from the network for nefarious purposes, and we'd all share the burden of keeping adequate transceiver power available, and the power would be generated from renewable energy sources.
But that ideal wireless world would still have far less capacity than the ideal wired world. The question is whether you think a user-driven wireless setup can be superior to the crappy wired situation we have now.
Many people have and have tried, wireless last mile has been attempted hundreds of time since 2005 (and the end of mandatory line-sharing).